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eBay has more brand power than Amazon

July 20, 2016 03:43 PM

Target Corp., Starbucks Corp. and eBay Inc. are more powerful brands than Amazon.com Inc., according to the new report, “2016 Top 100 Most Powerful Brands,” from marketing consultancy firm Tenet Partners.

Results are based on more than 10,000 interviews of decision-makers among the top 20% of U.S. corporations with annual revenues ranging from $50 million to several billion. To determine “Brand Power,” Tenet surveyed participants on two metrics: familiarity and favorability. Familiarity measures awareness of the brand. Respondents are considered to be familiar with a brand if they state they know more than just the company name. Favorability measures the perception of the brand, based on how it performs across three attributes, including overall reputation, perception of management and investment potential.

The report is focused on measuring the power of corporate brand names (not a product or divisional brands) of companies which have been publicly traded in the U.S. for at least five years and tracked by the CoreBrand Index for at least five years. The CoreBrand Index is another Tenant index that, via surveys, tracks 1,000 companies across 50 industries.

The top five most powerful brands are Coca-Cola, Hershey, Bayer, Walt Disney and Apple. Twenty e-commerce retailers ranked in the Internet Retailer 2016 Top 1000 made it into Tenet’s 2016 Top 100 Most Powerful Brands index. Those retailers and their Brand Power ranking are:

The Brand Power index categorizes many of the e-retailers included in the report in industries other than retail and internet. Apple, for example, is categorized in the “computers and peripherals” category and Walgreens is in “pharmacy services.”

Still, retail is the most represented category in the top 100 brands, accounting for 13 of the top corporate names. However, seven retailers in the report ranked lower than they did the previous year. Tenet partially attributes this to retailers which have not shifted fast enough to digital expectations of their shoppers.

EBay’s Brand Power ranking has continued to rise over the years to its current No. 29 spot. It ranked No. 40 last year and No. 70 in 2012. Survey participants ranked all of eBay’s favorability attributes higher than they did the previous year. Those attributes include overall reputation, perception of management and investment potential, which account for its rise in the Brand Power rankings. The online marketplace’s spinoff from payment processor PayPal Holdings Inc. in July 2015 generated positive brand influence, Tenet says, because the split allowed eBay to once again be viewed as an independent company.

While Amazon, (No. 1 in the Internet Retailer 2016 Top 500 Guide), ranked No. 54 on the Brand Power Index, the report still considers it a standout. The e-commerce giant climbed 15 spots from last year’s rankings, the biggest gain registered by any of the ranked company brands, according to the report. Amazon’s investment potential attribute has increased every year since 2006, and its reputation and perception of management attributes have risen every year since 2012, which contributed to Amazon’s higher rank this year, Tenet says.

This is the first year that Macy’s (No. 6 in the Top 500) was ranked among the top 100 corporate brands, climbing 12 spots to No. 95. Tenet attributes many of Macy’s mobile initiatives—from adopting beacon technology for location-based mobile marketing and to implementing mobile payments systems such as Apple Pay—for its higher ranking.